[bestbits] substantive proposals for Brazil summit - IG governance

Avri Doria avri at acm.org
Mon Feb 3 09:51:35 EST 2014


Hi,


On 03-Feb-14 09:05, Carolina Rossini wrote:
> Agree. It would be important to incorporate this in our contributions.
> March 1st is the deadline.
>
>

Very much agree that we need to substantive and need to submit 
substantive comments that are from the CS perspectives by the deadline.

> On Monday, February 3, 2014, Jeremy Malcolm <jeremy at ciroap.org
> <mailto:jeremy at ciroap.org>> wrote:
>
>     On 3 Feb 2014, at 3:51 am, Ian Peter <ian.peter at ianpeter.com
>     <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','ian.peter at ianpeter.com');>> wrote:
>
>>     Multistakeholderism is, to at least some parties, a wonderful mask
>>     to aid industry dominance with no governmental involvement
>>     whatsoever.

This does not make sense to me.  In all of the multistakeholder models, 
there is great care to include governments.  There is a strong desire on 
the part of many to get more parts of government included such as their 
parliamentarians, regulators and data protection officers, among others.

I think that any model that does not include the multiplicity of 
stakeholders including government, isn't a multistakeholder scheme, and 
to use it as an example of a multistakeholder scheme just sets up an 
easy target.


>>     And I think we need to be honest about the fact that not all
>>     stakeholders have equal power in this – civil society arguments do
>>     not carry the weight of the large internet corporations, and to
>>     pretend that ms-ism somehow changes this imbalance is either naive
>>     or deliberately misleading.

Well at the risk of running into accusations of naivete or worse, I 
think it depends.  Civil Society can have great power when it uses it 
uses it. And we have seen it do so in many areas of advocacy. But when 
CS cannot organize itself in a way that allows it to use its incredible 
power, then it doesn't have power.  Our power takes many forms but 
usually involves coordinated activity on a particular goal in a similar 
direction.

But until we figure out what we want to direct ourselves toward, we 
can't coordinate our actions.

If killing the multistakeholder model is our goal, a model I believe CS 
has the power to kill, I believe we will weaken CS, not strengthen it.



>>     I mention this here because, by the looks of Brazil and the way
>>     the agenda is shaping up, we are going to talk about principles
>>     for governance, and this word multistakeholderism is going to be
>>     front and centre. I think we need to unwrap it a little and state
>>     clearly that the real issues going on are between governmental and
>>     industry control, neither of which of itself is of itself a
>>     satisfactory model.

Which is the reason I thought we were working toward a multistaekholder 
model that includes all stakeholders.


>
>     Brilliantly put Ian.  Agree that this will be a key differentiator
>     between what civil society puts forward for the meeting and what (if
>     anything) 1net may put forward.

/1net is only providing a aggregation point to make the process 
scalable.  Of course CS is going to put out it own 
statements/contributions with its own messages.  I do not think anyone 
ever said anything other than that.

I look forward to contributing to BB efforts on a statement.  I just 
hope its focus is not the destruction of the multistakeholder model. 
That I would not be able to support.

avri



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